10 Years of Green Building

It has been an astounding decade for advocates of sustainable construction in St. Louis. Ten years ago, when Bob Berkebeile helped people in St. Louis start one of the first local chapters of the U.S. Green Building Council, the LEED (Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design) building rating system had been on the market for only a year.

As of May 2011, there were 139 LEED buildings in the St. Louis area. Several area municipalities had adopted LEED ordinances for public buildings or publicly-financed construction. The local chapter had grown to over 500 members throughout Missouri, and architects, engineers, and contractors were implementing sustainable building practices on all sorts of projects that never applied for a LEED designation.

"Growth has been exponential," said Timothy Michels, president of Energy Solutions Inc., who was a founding member of what is now known as the Missouri-Gateway Chapter of the U.S. Green Building Council (USGBC) and a member of its Technical Committee. "Our chapter is one of the premier chapters nationally," he said.

"It is impressive," said JoAnn Brookes, past board chair of the Missouri-Gateway chapter of the USGBC. "The overall metrics of the city are not impressive - we keep losing population - but St. Louis is in the top 10 cities for number of LEED projects and top 5 for the number of LEED Platinum-certified homes," she said.

The influence of LEED standards reaches far beyond the number of LEED buildings. "We have many, many clients, who say they want to do their building to LEED standards, but they don't want to get it certified. They do it to LEED standards because people want higher quality space," Michels said.

"I'm 100 percent sure that people are incorporating green into their buildings even if they don't pursue LEED, because that is what we did at the Commerce Bank Center Building," said Deborah Frank, vice president, sustainability, at the Missouri Botanical Garden. "We used LEED criteria and the checklist to inform design, but chose not to pursue certification," she said.

Gestation of the GBC

The green building council in St. Louis had many parents, but a crucial coupling occurred when the Missouri Botanical Garden took over the EarthWays Center in 2000 and made Frank its executive director. The EarthWays Center had opened in a renovated Victorian residence in Grand Center in 1994 to showcase energy efficient building systems, recycled products, and waste reduction practices. The founding organization had run out of money, but it had been kept open for school tours by the Cooperating School District's Missouri Energy & Resource Partners project, of which Frank was the director.

Another fruitful connection came when Patrick Justis, now senior program manager for energy efficiency at Ameren Missouri, got in touch with Frank. Justis had recently begun a new job in the St. Louis outreach office of the state energy center of the Missouri Department of Natural Resources. Justis contacted people interested in green buildings and building energy efficiency in St. Louis and invited them to a meeting in the conference room at the DNR office at Chouteau and Vandeventer Avenue.  "It was just a group of people meeting and talking about how to influence the market," he said, but eventually it led to a government grant to the botanical garden to help establish a green building council in St. Louis.

"Timing is everything," Frank said. "Many people locally had tried to start a green building initiative, such as the climate group of the AIA (American Institute of Architects), but now being able to say that the Missouri Botanical Garden was behind it added clout to the initiative that it otherwise might not have had," she said.  Timing was right in several respects. The U.S. Green Building Council (USGBC), founded in 1993, was debating whether or not to allow the formation of local chapters and the release of the LEED building rating system in 2000 gave members something concrete to promote.

St. Louis became the sixth chapter of the USGBC in August 2001. “We started by having programs,” Frank said. “We demonstrated to the region that we are a place to come to learn about green building and to network to build your business,” she said.

The first program was a speech by Bob Berkebeile at the botanical garden in June 2001, which Frank said was attended by close to 100 people.  That was followed by a LEED training seminar in August, which attracted 80 people. At a joint program with ASHRAE (American Society of Heating, Refrigeration & Air-conditioning Engineers) in October, people were asked to sign-up if they were interested in green building. Peter Raven headlined the program in December when the newly chartered chapter began accepting members. A month later, with 100 members enrolled, the St. Louis chapter of the USGBC elected its first officers.  It took a little longer to start getting buildings built in line with LEED. When the Alberici headquarters was certified platinum and achieved the most points of any LEED project in 2005, it was only the sixth project to achieve LEED certification in St. Louis. Six years later, there are 139 local LEED-certified projects.

“We needed the leadership of an Alberici to demonstrate to folks that a construction company could embrace LEED. People could see that even if it was a little more expensive at the start, it had great payback,” Frank said.

Changing the Way People Think

The real field work, and this still is going on, was to change the way that people think about building cost, design, and construction.  The challenge with cost meant getting owners and their lenders to breach the Chinese wall that separated construction and operating costs and look at life-time costs instead of initial costs. Then, a convincing case could be made that a $2/sf increase on a 100,000-square-foot building could save $1 million over 10 years.  “Tenants have understood the business case, and owner-users always have understood it. We're still working on developers and financial institutions,” said Brookes.

A challenge for designers was learning to abandon the linear design process with which they were familiar in favor of bringing other consultants and contractors into the process early to engage in an integrated design process. That produces creative problem solving in design and construction sequencing that reduces costs. Then green buildings are not necessarily more expensive than conventional buildings.

"Re-educating the industry to understand that early design integration was not a threat to the ultimate design esthetic was key,"
Frank said.  As people learned the process and the goals of efficiency and sustainability, designing and building green buildings got easier.
Marc Lopata, board chair elect, said that when he moved here six years ago, not much green building was going on. "Now it is becoming commonplace," he said.

"We've gotten past the first learning curves. We see a lot of silver and gold projects in the city now, because people understand what it takes to get to those levels," Brookes said. "We piloted LEED CI (Commercial Interiors) here and I remember the challenge we had at HOK just getting this office certified, but now all of our other offices are either platinum or gold," she said.

Paul Todd Merrill, current board chair and director of sustainable construction at Clayco, agreed that it took some effort to educate and train staff, subcontractors, and such as recycling construction waste. "We had to impress on waste companies that we wanted to do something different from what they were used to," he said. As a result, "we, and companies like us, have changed the market place for the services that they provide," he said.  Field crews, he said, have totally embraced recycling and sustainability, to the point where they ask, 'why haven't we always done this?' On projects where Clayco doesn't have to pursue waste credits, they recycle anyway, "because it has become part of the standard way we operate," Merrill said.

And, it is not just service providers that are responding to the demands of sustainable builders. So, too, are material vendors. "Materials that were boutique materials before are now standard products," he said.

"There has absolutely been a big shift in thinking," Brookes said. "Material vendors have rethought how to make their materials. Structural engineers are re-thinking how to look at concrete and substituting fly ash for Portland cement. That is a big shift. The manufacture of Portland cement alone accounts for six percent of the world's CO2 emissions. If you replace 40 percent of cement with fly ash, you have a low-emitting material.  "When someone comes up with a substitute for PVC and vinyl, the industry will change even more dramatically," she said.

What's next?

"We have a high mission to make all new buildings green buildings within a generation," Justis said. "I think there will be upward pressure from code officials in the next 10 years that raise the bar for everyone, but LEED will stay out in front of codes as a north star pointing to where we should be going," he said.

"We're headed toward zero net energy buildings. The handwriting is on the wall. ASHRAE standards are moving in that direction. There is the 2030 challenge (to build net zero energy buildings). Maybe we won't get there by 2030, but certainly we will in my lifetime," Brookes said.

"Ten years from now, there probably won't be a building built unless it meets or exceeds LEED certification, because banks won't finance it otherwise," Michels said. "LEED is setting expectations for the market. When speculators come back, they won't have the option to build a lower quality building than LEED," he added.

"The big challenge is the buildings that are already built. We've barely scratched the surface there. That building stock is vast," Brookes said. "I truly believe that energy efficiency measures in existing buildings will be on the rise as people elect to renovate in place instead of building new," Merrill said. "Monitoring your energy use today from a business standpoint and planning for reductions in the future is a big part of what is coming," he said

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